I get increasing frustrated with the tags assigned to books by publishers, I have more tags in calibre than books. As a result I have followed the guidelines and defined within Calibre a custom field to hold a genre for each book. Before setting up my own Genre this raises one question.

Yes there is. The kind libraries use. I think the English name is Hewey Decimal System, but I could be wrong. Just use the top of level and you have an easy to understand genre categorization for your books.

Hmm, wouldn't it be great if there was a plug-in in Calibre for that? :scratchchin:

Keep meaning to do a more definitive list, but the problem with defining lists is its an infinite black hole of time suckage :/

For instance, does erotic fiction come under romance or does it need its own category and without that do you want straight/gay/BDSM etc etc. Urban fantasy is currently a 'thing' so again, do we have a new category or use fantasy-mystery & crime-horror tags?

Another tag I've seen used occasionally is 'womens fiction' - I allways thought it as devisive as a 'men's fiction' tag but thats just my opinion so may be valid for a lot of people.

Bottom line, I try to keep a simple fiction list as I tend to prevaricate if I think about it too much

Edit: forgot to add military fiction as a tag - I don't use it for myself as I don't like the genre but I guess it should be on the list.

The genres publishers use are marketing categories, and seem to have no real connection to subjet matter. In short, it's a recommendation to retailers on how to shelve books, based on what stuff people will buy if they see it next to something else they want to buy. That's why science fiction and fantasy get shelved together - the book stores feel there's a lot of crossover in the markets.

The only categories you'll find are consistent are your own, and generally, those will be limited to "stuff I like," "stuff I don't like," and "stuff I'd like to use to start a fire."

My genre tags are pretty idiosyncratic. I'll give a series all the same tag, because I'm more likely to be looking for an In Death book than I am Mystery with Female Detective. Since I use my genre tags to create my kindle collections, I use tags that will help me find which collection something is in.